ECOPOESIS SEMINAR:
CREATIVE RESPONSES to CLIMATE CHANGE/How We Activate Space, How We Map Place**This course will meet on Friday with four Saturday field trips to the Presidio.This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary ecological thought and design.  Co-created by Professors Leslie Carol Roberts (MFA Writing) and Christopher Falliers (MArch), who founded the global ECOPOESIS Project in 2018 with Prof. Adam Marcus (Architecture), this course offers CCA graduate students across disciplines the opportunity to explore ecological thought and design through varied lenses and practice models.Historically, the practice of ecological storytelling by writers, architects, designers, and artists produces texts, objects, and speculative representations often towards a polemic and often in isolation by discipline.Students in this seminar will engage in learning through writing and made work - focusing on how we activate space. We also think of ecologies not as “nature” alone but through instantiated systems of racism, misogyny, and neoliberal capitalism. We will explore the Presidio as an indigenous site, a colonized site, a militarized site, and as a site of creative environmental design towards ecological restoration.The final, collaborative work (both courses) will be an “atlas” that is an invitation to explore place and spatial representation through writing and image.My section, offered through MFA Writing, will come at this work through texts across genres and disciplines: the novel, the short story, the essay, journalism, and films. We will focus on the craft of writing through close readings, while raising our individual knowledge of research practices and how to read and write through complex topics.The Fall 2020 course will meet on Fridays at the CCA MFA Writing studio, where we will discuss both the assigned texts and look at individual writing projects in a workshop environment. We will think about how varied writers engage with ideas of futures, ecologies, and philosophical and pragmatic challenges of climate change through sci-fi, cli-fi and other forms of fiction and nonfiction. We will deeply consider the act and practice of walking and ponder the "walking essay" historically. The walk, as essay and as portrayed in fiction, will be a core focus of our written work. Over the course of the term both sections will meet together four times on the site of our exploration: San Francisco’s Presidio, where we will work with biologists, designers, and artists thinking about how to activate space.Our collaborative work with ECOPOESIS has been featured in Russia, the Maldives, Saudi Arabia, as well as in peer-reviewed publications. You can see some of our work here: https://www.architecturalecologies.cca.edu/research/ecopoesis/how-we-hear-now**This course will meet on Friday with four Saturday field trips to the Presidio.The history of ecological storytelling, from Neo-paleolithic cave dwellers’ depictions suggesting a unity with “nature,” to utopian promises and dystopian warnings, illustrates an evolving sense of human relational identity to ecologies. As our everyday lives are increasingly suffused by the impacts of climate change and climate chaos, we must craft new narratives that critically reframe the language, syntax, diction, form, media, and representation of ecologies. 

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